concept is novel, perhaps even obscene…perhaps we can retire to yonder legal library. A narrow examination of the Edicts might elucidate an overlooked exception.”
Anomus, without a word, plucked the Dark Iron Wand from Manxolio’s surprised fingers and tossed it lightly into the air. It fell into the Cleft, ringing against the broken columns and canted floors as it toppled, glinting in the rosy light. Eventually the chiming clatter ceased. Faintly came also the sinister whispering moan of the Wand.
The pale faces peering between the columns underfoot, startled by the noise, ran away.
Anomus said, “Behold. I confess to both tortuous battery, impertinence, and theft of a priceless heirloom. Rather than trouble your magistrate, I hereby condemn myself. Will you lower me on the chain of the derrick? Otherwise the legacy of House Quinc is forever lost.”
The Invigilators said nothing, but stood blinking.
The afternoon sky was dark with cloud. Manxolio Quinc rode an oast, a disturbingly humanoid biped, which he controlled by thongs through its nose. Anomus was mounted on a more traditional blue-feathered horse.
The men rode along the dry streambed of the dead river Scaum. To either hand rose the barren earth walls of an old streambed. A line of crooked trees, ginkgo and gumwood, grew along what had once been the riverside. The landscape around was rolling slopes of waist-high grass, dry and gray, interrupted by lumps of granite and flint.
A remnant of the river, a mere stream a boy could have waded, slid noiselessly through a trough of mud and rocks, amid the bones of many fishes. Lily pads and lotus plants grew there, half masking the yellow water in green.
Manxolio toyed with the Implacable Dark Iron Wand as they rode. The metal of the shaft was blacker than heretofore, rich and shining with dark luster. A spark of greenish-white acetylene light appeared at the blunt tip of the wand whenever Manxolio, astonishment in his eyes, squinted at it. He would laugh; the spark would vanish, and then, a moment later, with innocent glee, he would squint again, and make the burning spark reappear.
Anomus said, “Do not exhaust the charge. As I warned, I was only able to stir to action two of the secondary functions: first, the Zone of Intrusive Nigrescence, which darkens the luminary spectrum in all its phases; and second, the Many-valued Magnific Exultation. This is a complex vibration of sympathetic pulses, which will enable partial amplification of any third-order force or lower, and follow its vector and configuration, and augment it. Of the primary functions, I performed a bypass by means of a shunt, but it is frail. The phlogiston chambers have sufficient vehemence to produce a single lance of fire in the pyroconductive mode. I could not restore variant control, as the aperture valve is lost; the cell will discharge all its power at once.”
Manxolio contented himself with silently commanding the picaroon hook to open or shut with a satisfying snap. He could feel the power of the wand in his brain, present, but unobtrusive, like a whisper from a dark closet into a sunlit room. “How did you survive the Cleft? What happened beneath the Earth?”
“I discovered the node buried beneath the rubble of a flooded museum-chamber, but it still glistened with sufficient power that I was able to recharge auxiliary manifestation. Three times I held my breath and dived beneath the still, dark, freezing waters of the mausoleum floor. The only tools I had to work with were those the Wand itself temporarily solidified out of hardened air. I could not repair the main cells. However, when in contact with the potentium node, the wand was able to detect a second, but very faint, whisper of power. It lies in this direction. That is what you are supposed to be seeking with the Wand, and why it is, in theory at least, in your hand now.”
“Of course! I was just, ah…In any event, how was it that the Inhumed did not rip your body to bits, and consume the flesh of your limbs and frame?”
“Once I restored power to the lighting elements, they were grateful, and were willing to stay out of sight while I negotiated with you to lower a sturdy chain. I promised I would secure their release.”
“And your threat to unleash a cataclysm of fire, I assume, was a similar falsehood? The wand, if it is still as weak as you say, could not cut through bedrock and flagstones to envelope the Magistracy building in a holocaust!”
Anomus gave him a quizzical look. “My comment, if anything, was an understatement. As I said, I could not replace the aperture valve on the main beam emitter.”
Manxolio sniffed. “You are merely fortunate that I recalled that one of the ancient prerogatives of the Civic Remonstrator was to commute sentences. Otherwise the Uhlans would not have worked the derrick to remove you from the Cleft.”
Anomus said blandly, “Yet I was not sentenced by any lawful process.”
“A mere technicality. Your act was an eccentric affront to conformity. But no matter, for, look there!” He pointed up to where the brush and grasses by the river bank had been disturbed. “Our investigation nears a definite result. Your trail here entered the streambed.”
Plainly visible were naked footprints in the clay of the slope. “There is your foot, preserved in a muddy petrosomatoglyph. Observe the disturbance in the eucalyptus leaves, elsewhere fallen evenly, and the snapped twigs. There was rain two days ago, and water would have smoothed the edges of these prints, or sponged them away in a wash of mud. This gives us an upper limit for the time. Do you recall pushing through the brush here?”
Anomus squinted and shook his head. “I recall tumbling. Perhaps it was this slope.”
“What else do you recall?”
“It was night. As I said, the stars seemed out of place. I fell down the slope because I came upon it unawares.”
“Why did you not await the dawn-light?”
“I did not know how long the nights lasted on this world.”
Manxolio’s face grew long with surprise. “A singular comment, even eccentric. This leads to a strange supposition.”
With some difficulty, the two men drove or lead the biped and the blue-feathered horse up the muddy slope. They pressed past the brush and gumwood trees. Unlimbering a lantern made from the carbuncles of luminous fish, Manxolio narrowly inspected the ground. For an hour, they followed the meager traces: a broken leaf, a displaced pebble sitting pale-side up.
They debated for a time what to do, whether to return to Old Romarth and secure a hunting pack of ahulphs, or set out sugar to attract a Twk-man, when the upper winds, breaking apart the cloud cover, allowed cerise, rose, and orange beams of light to touch upon the landscape. The ruddy light caught a tumble of bright stones in the distance.
Below them was a wide valley, bisected by the riverbed. The lower parts of the valley were inundated, for the Scaum was blocked. A great topple of stone formed a crude dam, and, behind it, a lake had spread. From the waters rose broken columns, and mossy, topless towers, broken arches, and vacant windows. From their shape, it was clear that the stones forming the dam were nothing other than the houses and towers, fortresses and defensive walls, of what had once been a small city, pulled up by some unimaginable force and heaped into a dike.
Not far from where they stood and observed these melancholy ruins, rose a single standing stone, incised with moss-obscured designs. Here and there, poking through the clumped grass and bushes, rose statues of graceful maidens, now armless, their piquant features blurred with rain. Between these statues ran a roadway of white stone, now green and cracked with overgrowth. Sections of the city walls were still standing, triangular as broken teeth, and not all the houses and mansions of the suburbia were inundated, though all were unroofed, doorless, weed-choked.
